How to Play Mus
Description
The Basque partnership game where the hand you show and the hand you play can be entirely different things. Bluffing is built into the rules — and the table will read you anyway.
Also known as: El Mus
Objective
Team up with the player across from you and be first to reach 40 points, won by bluffing your way through four rounds of betting — not by playing your cards out.
Setup
Four players in fixed partnerships, using a 40-card Spanish-style deck.
Everyone gets four cards.
Rules
Before betting starts, players can agree to discard and redraw to improve their hands — but only if everyone agrees; a single "no" locks the hands as they are.
Betting happens across four separate rounds, each judging a different thing: Grande (who has the highest cards), Chica (who has the lowest), Pares (who has the best matching pairs), and Juego (who's closest to or over a card-value target).
In each round, teams bet or pass — you can bet on a bad hand just as easily as a good one, since nobody's cards are shown until everything's settled.
A team can go all-in on a single round with an "órdago," risking the entire match on that round alone.
Winning
Once all four rounds are bet out, hands are finally revealed and compared for each round in turn — winning a round scores points, with bonus stakes for whatever was riding on it.
First team to 40 points wins the match — unless someone's órdago was accepted and lost, which ends the match immediately.